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Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

I'm always fascinated by the breakdown in communication that can occur when you order a cake. I love figuring out what went wrong just by looking at the cake; it beats any crossword puzzle or word jumble.

Sometimes the explanation is pretty straight forward:

As you can see, there is in fact a "Coca Cola can/bottle" on this cake.

Other times there's a severe misunderstanding from the get-go:

I like to think that if they'd spelled "capital" correctly they might have figured it out.

Sometimes you specifically ask for little plastic "Happy Birthday sticks" stuck in your order of cupcakes:

Other times you're just not specific enough:

And sometimes, on wonderful, rare occasions, you get an amazingly talented baker. A baker with mad piping skills, a steady hand, and perfect spelling. A baker who, incidentally, is also a little hard of hearing. So, when you get this baker, and you want to order a giant Gerber daisy on your cake, just be sure you enunciate really, really well.

Because otherwise...

You might get the Gerber Baby.

(Yes, really. Scout's honor.)

A big "thanks" in all caps to Heather F., Brianne H., Jessie B., Kristina R., & Kelly Y., who had some 'splaining to do on her last birthday.

I love the Gerber Baby, (still have my Gerber baby doll from the 70's!) but they meant "Gerbera Daisy". Should have asked for a Montauk Daisy, would have saved a lot of grief. (:wv; corma... "Happy Birthday corma Love corma Mom."

I could have totally made the Gerber mistake (although not the cake since I do not have such mad piping skills, not even close!).

If I ever start a business (and I have no plans to), I think I'll make clients submit stuff in writing and then make it part of the protocol that I or one of my wonks calls them to confirm for sure that everybody is on the same page. It's tragic that such a lovely job wasn't what was wanted!

I just have to say that I love this blog. I don't read many blogs regularly... just yours in fact(Cake Wrecks and E-bot), and they never fails to bring a smile to my face. So thank you for a daily smile. :)

Wow. That last cake is fantastically well done, and the decorator is extremely talented. I don't even want to think about how long it must have taken them to perfectly execute the WRONG picture on that cake. And the amount of stiff drinks it would take to regain composure after hearing all the customer wanted was a daisy.

lol @ KittyKat- no kidding! I can see the tears and freaking out of just trying to get it perfect and then they were like "oh no hon, I just wanted a flower" For some reason I just wrote that with the voice of that guy from the family guy. If you're cool you know who I mean.

I can't believe all the people that think everyone should know the correct names of flowers are. They just went to order a cake guys. Especially if it was a manly man, he's just going to be like put a freakin flower on it and call it a day.

Hey Kimberly! I worked at the HEB bakery for a short while and they have a form that has to be filled out with exactly what you want the cake to say and where (there's even a little diagram for placement). That hasn't stopped some wrecks from getting through... even when the customer signs the paper stating it's correct only to find out later that they didn't bother to spellcheck what they wrote themselves. So while usually the decorator--sometimes it's the customer.

Been reading Cake Wrecks for a while and felt I was getting immune to the hilarity...until I got to the Gerber baby cake and had to suppress an uncontrollable snort. Wish I had mad piping skills like that, because, as someone named Daisy with decent hearing, I happen to know the difference between a gerbera daisy and a Gerber baby!

I love the Gerber Baby cake. At least it's a birthday cake, which is in celebration of someone's birth, which means that they were a cute little baby once...right?

@KittyKat, 11:29amI'm laughing so hard imagining the baker's realization that she/he just worked 3 more hours than he/she needed to. But I'm also feeling sorry for the baker for how embarrassed she/he must have felt when they learned what the customer had actually asked for.

Thanks for the laughs, Jen. You always start my day out right! (can you tell I'm a late sleeper?)

I love the Gerber Baby cake. At least it's a birthday cake, which is in celebration of someone's birth, which means that they were a cute little baby once...right?

@KittyKat, 11:29amI'm laughing so hard imagining the baker's realization that she/he just worked 3 more hours than he/she needed to. But I'm also feeling sorry for the baker for how embarrassed she/he must have felt when they learned what the customer had actually asked for.

Thanks for the laughs, Jen. You always start my day out right! (can you tell I'm a late sleeper?)

My mom actually wrote on a cake order form that she wanted it in "manly colors" and they ended up getting it right (blue and green, and everything spelled correctly). That baker makes up for these poor dears.

Perhaps the way to avoid situations like these is to have customers submit their orders to CW comments for spellcheck and factual verification before forwarding to the bakery... (JK)

#1 We know what would have happened if the customer had brought a Coke bottle or can and said, "put this on the cake," right?

#2 Someone's 55th birthday? Some child whose name starts with 'L' just turned 5? Viva Las Vegas? Oh, by the way... why is it shiny?

#3 Obviously, the problem here is that instead of saying, "I'd like 'happy birthday' sticks on these cupcakes," the customer should have asked for 'happy birthday' sticks on *all of* these cupcakes. Which would either have meant fewer cupcakes or a lot more writing...

#4 Simple. Elegant. In the best tradition of 'Under Neat That'.

#5 Theory I: Kelly's baby picture bears a striking resemblance to the Gerber baby. Theory II: Maybe the wreckerator just wanted to avoid controversy: "Is that a daisy, or a dogwood blossom, or a lotus flower, or..."

@Kimberly Chapman: Sound theory, but impractical; if wreckerators verified orders, at the end of the month there would be an $18 Zillion phone bill and no cakes made.

What these bakeries ought to do is contract order-taking out to a call center somewhere. Then bakery employees could follow a simple sequence: read the order, make the cake, process the refund, send a picture to Cake Wrecks, eat the evidence. Much more efficient that way.

@Pandora (2): My sentiments exactly. Florists get paid to know about flowers, bakers know about wrecks. If I needed a specific flower on a cake, I would go to the florist, say "I'd like that one, please," then go to the baker and say, "I would like a cake that has this on it, please." After that, I would just have to hope the flower was food-safe. Or not worry about it, depending on whether I like the intended recipient of the cake. (JK)

Hmm. It could just be that "daisy" came across as "desi" (i.e. subcontinental), the baby also looks like that with its big black eyes and curly black hair. I am not sure what the baker was thinking, though, since the two words are IMHO pronounced quite differently, and why would Kelly want a giant desi baby on her cake? Apart from that, "Gerber" seems not to have been understood at all, but if English is not your mother tongue it is pretty likely that you don't know all the flower names, I would probably not have understood it either. Just my two cents.

sometimes (as a former cake decorator myself) its the consumer who ruins it.last year a man came in and requested a Buzz Lightyear cake for his 21 year old son. i was a little confused, and asked if he was sure his son would appreciate this, he replied "of course, hes not under age or anything".

hmmmm, ok its YOUR cake man, i thought, and made a fun blue cake with space ships and buzz firing his wrist gun. it turned out pretty good, and i was happy.the next day, i was written up for giving my owners grandson (oh yes, turns out that was their kid) the wrong cake. it was supposed to be a BUD LIGHT cake. ouch. my first fail. i found out later that the man who ordered the cake is legally deaf, and didnt hear me when i repeated the order. after that he got to fill out his own cake orders :)

I love when cakes are misspelled. Last year for my friend's 35th birthday our other friend got him a cake. All it said was "Big Guy, 35, Farve," because our friend was a Green Bay fan. There was no Happy Birthday. And "Farve" is actually spelled "Favre." You would think people would write this out and spell check before they make these mistakes?

I don't understand why so many people are doing the Epcot over Gerber Daisies.

Every garden center around here calls them "Gerber Daisies."

The Florist shops sell "Gerber Daisies" too.

I've NEVER been told by anyone, horticulturist, florist, or other that "Gerber Daisy" is somehow a completely invalid method of referring to the particular plant, and only the "GerberA" form is legitimate.

Besides, if the fabulously talented decorator who created the baby cake hadn't misheard the order, we wouldn't have anything over which to hide out in the Epcot bunker and eat cake, now would we?

wv: unbubblI have no idea what it means but it made me giggle. Maybe it's a name for what you play with at an UN-birthday party. It's your Un-birthday. Here blow an unbubbl.

I usually drop in, read, laugh (wee a little), and leave assuming there are already 200 "lol, you guys are awesome" comments and one more would just get lost in the fray. In light of Marti-gate, I thought I would stop and try to express to Team Cakewrecks how wonderful you guys are and how much I appreciate you posting throughout the insanity, and how the laughs you provide help get many of us through our own dark days.

The cheap phone system in our bakery actually saved me from making a wreck. We can barely hear customers sometimes and end up repeating the spelling and sometimes shouting to be heard. The company refuses to do anything about the phones. Usually when customers call and we are not sure about the message we write what we think they said and annotate "wait to write message until the customer arrives." Usually this saves from scraping the cake. Anyway a customer called and asked if we could do a "Gerber Baby." We talked about the cake and I repeated it back to her many times. I didn't have a picture on hand to work with so I asked her to bring one in. Of course she brought in a picture of a Gerber daisy. If I had gone out of my way to find a picture for the customer as I usually do, I would have made that wreck.

@Dr. Vic asked: "Do the bakers get chain-gang labor, repeated beatings, and time in the Box?"

Of course not. Those things are reserved for people who dare to assert that anything has ever been deep-fried and try to cite Wikipedia as proof.

Bakers just receive their 15 minutes of 'fame' here, then they are free to leave -- if we're in a good mood. Which we usually are. Except, that is, when we go to EPCON 1* and things start getting...interesting. Mwahahaha.

Reading this blog @ midnight during our vacation in the UK, I showed my husband the Gerber/Gerbera Daisy/Baby cake and I had to keep shh-ing him as to not wake up the other occupants of the B&B with his laughing! Keep it coming guys, I love your blogs and read them daily :o)

"What these bakeries ought to do is contract order-taking out to a call center somewhere."I work in the Quality dept of a large call center. Some of the more harmless spelling errors I've seen include spelling out "underscore" & "at symbol" in emails. Yes, even though every one of them has to be proficient with email! (i.e. cakeunderscorewrecksatsymbolefacepalmdotcom). Did I forget to mention the "dot?"

Then there's the ones that get rude. Did you know furnaces "sh_t" down? Nope, not the letter above the "j" but the one to the right of it. :D Spell Check was eventually installed- now, maybe they'll use it one day.

There've been a few lewd ones, too, but I can't mention those here (compact DISCS can be mispelled very, very hysterically but men don't find it as funny as women do).

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